In the wake of IBM’s releasing its Lotus Notes Traveler Companion software for the iPhone and an announcement at Macworld Expo that Lotus Connections for social networking inside companies and Lotus Quickr for sharing documents would be coming to the iPhone, an IBM official told Forbes that the company not only wants to reach out to the small-but-growing number of iPhone users in the enterprise, but also use the new applications as a starting point from which to build App Store software for the forthcoming iPad.

“Our customers are looking at the iPad and they’re excited about it,” said Alstair Rennie, IBM’s manager of Lotus software. “No one quite knows its use patterns yet, but it’s our intention to deliver as much of our portfolio as possible on it as fast as possible.”

The applications from the corporate collaboration software will be designed specifically for use on the iPad, and are planned to see release sometime near the debut of the hardware, scheduled to arrive in late March. Rennie said IBM expects the iPad to be popular among executives who plan to use the device for both personal and business purposes.

The news follows comments from Microsoft representatives who have stated that the company is considering bringing its Office suite to the iPad.

Sources have also stated that Apple intends to target business users by offering added features on the iPad, including direct network printing from within applications and support for accessing shared files from a local file server.

Albeit there have been some utilities that have allowed your iPhone and iPod touch to double as a flash drive, this one may have it down pat.

And for free.

Per The Unofficial Apple Weblog, myPod Apps’ iPhone Explorer can be installed on your Mac or PC and allows you to view the folder structure, and drag and drop items to or from the iPhone to your desktop or back the other way.

Users can create, delete and rename folders on your iPhone. If your iPhone is jailbroken, they can access the real root and then recover things like your address book, emails and SMS messages.

iPhone Explorer requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later and iTunes 8 or later to install and run.

Take a gander, see what you think and feel free to hurl your two cents in as well.

Late Friday, Logitech released version 3.2 of its Control Center software. The update, a 17.9 megabyte download (via VersionTracker), offers the following fixes and changes for the driver software:

– Back and Forward have been added to the list of actions that can be assigned to mouse buttons. These actions are supported in web browsers, Finder, iCal, iTunes and iPhoto.

– A warning will appear when the SteerMouse application is detected. When SteerMouse is installed, LCC will not be able to detect most Logitech mice and keyboards, as OS X does not allow devices to be controlled by more than one driver at a time.

Control Center 3.2 is available for free and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later to install and run.